The eSurge Consortium

CGI (formerly Logica) is a business and technology service company, employing 39,000 people. It provides business consulting, systems integration and outsourcing to clients around the world, including many of Europe's largest businesses. Logica creates value for clients by successfully integrating people, business and technology. It is committed to long term collaboration, applying insight to create innovative answers to clients’ business needs. We have a dedicated internationalSpace and Satcoms business with over 300 specialists and a long track record in delivering mission critical software systems across the Space sector, and in particular for Navigation and GNSS systems.

Logica have worked on many ESA Earth Observation projects, including GlobWave, CCI, GECA, PALSAR and many others.

TheNational Oceanography Centre (NOC) is a wholly owned centre of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). The NOC was formed by bringing together the NERC-managed activity at Liverpool’s Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory and the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, creating the UK’s leading institution for sea level science, coastal and deep ocean research and technology development. NOC is based on two sites, each with purpose built accommodation: the waterside campus in Southampton, alongside the University of Southampton’s School of Ocean and Earth Sciences, and the Joseph Proudman building on the Liverpool University Campus. The NOC is also home to the British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC); a national facility for looking after and distributing data concerning the marine environment.

The NOC hosts both the National Tidal and Sea Level Facility, and the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (since 1933), and contributes to the Storm Tide Forecasting Service (STFS), developing operational tide-surge models that provide UK coastal flood warning (in partnership with the Met Office and the Environment Agency). It has been at the forefront in developing interfaces to data sources and information.

NOC have been involved in ESA funded projects such as COASTALT, GlobColour and GlobWave.

The Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) is a public institute, with 400 employees and more than 600 associated observers. DMI provides meteorological, oceanographic and related services for the community within the large geographical area of the Kingdom of Denmark (Denmark, the Faroe Islands and Greenland), including surrounding waters and airspace. DMI’s area of activity comprises forecasting and warning services as well as continuous monitoring of weather, sea state, climate, and related environmental conditions in the atmosphere, over land and in the sea.

DMI has the national responsibility for carrying out the storm surge model forecasts and issues warning for the Danish areas to the Danish coastal authorities and the public in general. DMI is part of the Baltic Sea Operational Oceanographic System (BOOS) and North West Shelf Operational Oceanographic System (NOOS). In addition, DMI is the real-time in situ sea level centre for the BOOS and NOOS communities as well as in the MyOcean In situ TAC. It is part of the HIRLAM developing corporation and is operationally running a number of HIRLAM numerical forecast models for European and Arctic regions. Regional and large scale ocean models (HIROMB-BOOS and HYCOM) are operational at the institute. DMI is part of a corporation developing a coupled atmosphere, ocean and sea ice climate model (EC-Earth). Further, a high resolution coupled ocean and ice forecast model (HYCOM/CICE) is being developed at the institute.

The Coastal and Marine Research Centre (CMRC) in University College Cork was established in 1994 to undertake research into coastal and marine resource management. Research and consultancy in the CMRC is undertaken by staff with a range of specialist backgrounds, all of whom work collaboratively in a project orientated environment. The Centre’s expertise and skill sets are highly regarded both nationally and internationally. Fundamental and applied research in the CMRC is organised according to five specialist areas of interest: marine geomatics; applied remote sensing and GIS; marine and coastal governance; coastal processes and seabed mapping and marine ecology.

The CMRC has worked with data from a wide range of satellite EO instruments including MERIS, MODIS, SAR and higher resolution optical datasets (e.g. Landsat, IRS, SPOT, IKONOS) for land, coastal and marine applications. The CMRC is at the forefront of geomatic research with Europe and internationally, with an ability to work with a variety of data. Examples include the FP7 NETMAR, FP6 InterRisk and FP5 DISMAR projects. It has a track record of engaging end users in projects, for example it organised the CoastColour users’ workshop in 2008 and, was part of the organising committee for the UK remote Sensing and Photogrammetric annual conference held at UCC in September 2010.

The Koninklijk Nederlands Meteorologisch Instituut, KNMI, (Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute) is a government agency operating under the responsibility of the Ministry of Transport. It is an operational institute that provides weather observations, weather forecasts and vital weather information all year round, 24 hours a day, and 7 days a week. The institute carries out applied and fundamental research in support of its operational tasks and as a global change research centre. The processes of data acquisition and processing are highly automated to ensure cost effectiveness and quality. Skilled and experienced groups, specialised in such diverse topics as instrument development and electronic read-out, automation, computing, operations control and quality control are employed within the institute. The institute has four main departments and employs approximately 450 staff taking care of these tasks.

As an operational meteorological data centre and research institute in one, KNMI combines international contacts and co-operation projects in a practical sense. KNMI is an active member of such large international organisations as the World Meteorological Organisation (Geneva, CH), the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (Reading, UK) and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (Darmstadt, G).

The research section (WOND) is responsible for research and development for weather prediction. Within WOND, there is a section on active satellite wind measurement. This group participates in Eumetsat's Ocean and Sea Ice Satellite Application Facility (SAF) where it produces wind data from three scatterometers, the NWP SAF for scatterometer wind processing software services, and in the EU GMES Marine Core Services project, called MyOcean, with responsibility for the satellite wind and stress data processing of spatially and temporally consistent fields.